Augustus John and Gwen John. The Brother and Sister of Art.

For a long time I have known the name of Augustus John and his connection with Liverpool. 

I keep on seeing his portraits, such as The Marshesa Casati with her flame red hair. Luisa Casati looks like a Vamp.

Not as much is known of his sister Gwen.

He had been a prominent player in Liverpool's Art School and in its standing in the wider establishment. 

It appears that for him being there and passing on his valuable experience and energy to another generation that, we are all the better for it.

Augustus Edwin John had trained at The Slade School where he was a star.
He was appointed to the Liverpool Art Sheds 1901-02 to replace Herbert Jackson who had joined up to serve in the Boer War.

It was said he had a brilliant technique and a uninhibited approach and his Bohemian personality was well noted. 

This drew many students to his life classes. He looked Bohemian almost like a Jesus of Nazareth character with long flowing locks of hair down to his shoulders. His sister Gwen was totally the opposite more of a wallflower.

He married Ida in 1901, she was also a Slade student.

He painted many University figures while in Liverpool.

There were many artists around, C.J Allen, Herbert MacNair and Charles Reilly among many others were to become prominent figures in Liverpool, Allen being a one time assistant to Hamo Thorneycroft. 

The Art Sheds were a place where ideas and thoughts could be brought to fruition by those who attended.

John settled for a short while at 66 Canning street after short stays with friends. His studio then was No 2 Rodney Street. In 1902 after the birth of their first child David the John's moved to 138 Chatham Street for five months.

Gwen visited them that summer.

He then moved to Fitzroy Street London shortly after a failed election to Liverpool Academy in 1902 but he was back and forth to London by then.

He took a trip to Wales with John Sampson in 1903 and was still in Liverpool 1904 when Charles Reilly became Professor of Architecture. Charles Reilly would champion a new classical style moving away from the Arts and Crafts that was the fashion of the day, with haste.

Many of his drawings of Liverpool models were sent via William Rothenstein for exhibition at the Carfax Gallery.

He was made Honorary Member of Sandon Society of Artists 1908.

Brought up in the middle class town of Tenby, the Johns were born the children of a lawyer. Their mother had died when they were young and they had a nanny to look after them.

Gwen was shy and both her and Augustus showed a talent for art from an early age.

They stayed aloof from the goings on in the town. Showing an air of respectability for a middle class lawyer. He taught his children moral values. Those children would rebel against the steadiness of their fathers strict Anglican principles.

Augustus who was born 1878 reversed the tutoring of his father and headed for London to enrol in the Slade School of Art. He was uncertain of himself and his work was methodical and unremarkable. The revelation and new sensations of the model in his first life class would be something he would remember. He worked hard and in his second year his work became steady and his old master style astonished the tutors. Henry Tonks proclaimed him the best draughtsman since Michelangelo. His line became sure and his style became that of the bohemian.

 He discovered women. Woman is beauty and every artist loves beauty so every artist must love woman. This was an excuse he needed as he liked the company of woman above anything and the art gave him his chance to discover his own way of life centered around the female form.

Augustus became a legend at The Slade for his drawings but struggled with a brush but won an award for a biblical scene which was contrived from the old masters.

Gwen joined him there but remained in the background around Augustus's centre of attention approach. He commanded the signature John claiming it in his own pushy way.

They lived together for a while. In several cellars and basements and It was life of differences and she found it more difficult than he.

He was overpowering and she restrained. He married a friend of Gwen's, Ida to the dismay of her family. She adored Gus.

Gwen set off for France with a friend in 1903. Walking from Bordeaux to Rome she wanted to take her time and paint. It was said Whistler who she met in Paris influenced her after she abandoned her walk in Toulouse.

Montparnasse was her home living frugally in order without mess yards from Modigliani who arrived shortly after her. She painted many scenes with flowers that adorned her room. 

Inside her there always seemed to be that her inner eye was focused towards the church.

She posed for other artists including Rodin at the age of 63.

 He was the greatest living artist and she fell in love with him and his prodigious sexual appetite. 

She was obsessed by him but he would not be able to meet her demands though he really loved her.

He paid her rent and worried about her cat.

 I often think is that Gwen when I see a Rodin sculpture.

The memory of Whistler stayed with her. Her style stays strong from the start. She painted ordinary folk while Augustus later went for the big blockier strokes laying paint in a style of abandon. That worked. 

But he always retained a conservatism within the shadows of his work he always searched where Gwen seemed to have already found what she wanted to do. He dressed his sitters in fancy dress. She painted people that she identified with. Introvert and unassuming.

Augustus decided the Gypsy life was for him and he hit the open road falling in love with Dorothy McNeil who he met while living with Ida. His drawings of her show her as a real timeless beauty. Gwen talked her into becoming his muse and they set off for a life with Ida. The romanticism of the Gypsy stayed in his heart and he would take his caravan to Dartmoor with the two woman looking after Ida's newly born child.

He went to Paris.

Kindly drawn pictures of Caspar show a tenderness that did not represent the reality. Ida died in a Paris hospital giving birth. 

His wife had posed for him while looking after seven children.

Romelly John is quoted as saying”They had to compromise from the Gypsy life to the outside world”.

His paintings of the family show affection.

He then went to North Wales and he painted the mountain......that captivated him like one of his lovers. 

He then escaped further into nature but returned to Dorset painting blue pools, perhaps some of his best. His work shows impossible dreams and fantasies that dwelt in his mind.

He painted Yates and Shaw while in Ireland and was becoming a society painter in demand capturing the spirit of the sitter. His work never lost its uncertainty.

Provence called him to the classical land of his dreams. Roman lands of Greeks and gypsy spirits.

Martigues in Province became his home before the tourists arrived. He moved north and lived in complete simplicity with no running water just a well.

His children recalled him as a overbearing character who always vied for attention.

He built a studio in Chelsea while partying in the evenings with the rich and famous of the day. 

He was at the peak of his career. He would stride the Kings Road and Chelsea.

In 1913 Gwen became a catholic. This was at the deepest time of her affair with Rodin. Maybe a rejection of her upbringing she found a monastery and the nuns wanted her to paint religious pictures. Rodin disliked her praying in Church. “I am like a little animal groping in the dark” she told Gus. She moved, with her cats into a single room where she seemed happy. She took time to visit Gus. She rented a room by the sea in Brittany where she drew the local children wearing the black pinafore of the school. She drew the innocence of the little folk with tenderness. She controlled the paint more than she could people. She did not like to sell her work.

She collapsed in Dieppe right off the train and she died a few days later.

Augustus threw party's which were funded by his work but was still searching and in Friars Court he painted with a passion and intensity that was noticed by his sitters who were lit perfectly while he mixed his paint telling the sitter off if they moved a bit. His children found the sittings a strenuous time when he painted them, always alone except while he painted Dylan Thomas when one of his children was employed to fill the sitter with beer and keep him happy.

He painted T.E Lawrence.

Lord Leverhulme was so upset with his portrait that he cut out the head (since only that part of the image could easily be hidden in his vault) but when the remainder of the picture was returned by error to John there was an international outcry over the desecration.

His work was his life but forever he searched for inspiration and perfection.

He became unfashionable and the excitement had gone in the 1950's.

The flame had died. His last painting was a painting of the Camargue gypsies paying homage to their patron saint.

He called it a failure and said 50 years from now “I will be known as the brother of Gwen John”.

He missed the gypsy life, the outdoors and said “I wish I had never left Wales”

In 1961 he died aged 83. “Give me another hundred years” he had said “And I will become a very good painter”

In the latter years he would sit and stare at his sisters paintings and the fountain of her work that showed her moving towards her own abstraction. She did not see small things in a small way. The things she owned and people she knew, her cat's.

She exiled herself and the conflict within them both was played out through the canvasses they left behind. The essence of her life and existence. The little lark ascending.

Did they have the same insecurities that drove them on. 

Where else can you find a brother and sister on a journey through art like the John's.

Gwen John 1876-1939

Henry Tonks-The Real War Artist.

Henry Tonks was a war artist of the highest degree. He did not do landscapes.

He was a Professor. Maybe a little old fashioned.

Henry Tonks said when he taught art at the Slade “I will resign if this talk of cubism continues”

He had taught many artists such as Paul Nash at the Slade School of Art but he did not teach him enough. Paul Nash's paintings have become an important visual reference for us when thinking about the conflict, including this powerful, apocalyptic vision of nature violated by war. Nash was commissioned by a government scheme, in 1916, which initially aimed to illustrate publications with drawings to supplement the limited photographs available. Nash had served briefly in the Ypres Salient in 1917 before being invalided out. When he returned to Belgium as an artist, he was shocked by the devastation wrought by the battle of Passchendaele. All of the commissioned artists’ work had to be passed by the official censor. While depictions of dead British soldiers were unacceptable, this devastated landscape managed to pass unchallenged due to its symbolic, rather than literal, content. Nash’s startling, new, modernist vision would bring him huge acclaim in the art world.

However, Colonel A N Lee, the censor, could not foresee this. He wrote: “I cannot help thinking that Nash is having a huge joke with the British public, and lovers of ‘art’ in particular. Is he?”

http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/dead-mans-penny-edward-carter-preston.html

While Paul Nash was basking in glory, stylising suffering as official war artist, Henry Tonks was recording the reality of war on a very intimate scale.

Tonks too old for front line action volunteered as an orderly.

Dr Harold Gilles had helped set up a pioneering new hospital specialising in facial surgery. 

When Gilles, who was the head surgeon realised that Tonks was working there his instincts to record the remodelling or rebuilding of a face were assisted when he asked Tonks to help him.

 He needed colour and Tonks with his background as a surgeon and then as a demonstrator of anatomy understood what Gilles needed.

He was in the right place at the right time to do his bit for the war.

Reconstructive surgery at that time was largely at its infancy and mostly made up of just clinching flesh, and pulling it over to close up a wound and stitching it into a part of the face that would help it to resemble what was there before.

Tonks sat with forlorn soldiers who had given up hope, whose lives were dead inside.

Some would never recover from the wounds they had endured. 

When we say the scars of war, he recorded them in all their disfigured glory. 

They were humans who had given themselves in the cause of freedom.

With dignity Tonks made a portrait in soft pastel of Walter Ashworth of the Bradford Pals who injured on the first day of the first world war.

In the first few minutes the Pals were cut to ribbons.

He also made a diagram of where to stitch and then he painted him again after the reconstruction that gave him what was described as 'a pleasant smile'.

Art as modernism in a modern age. He had to use the skills of Leonardo Da Vinci for a new age, after all he was qualified.

He said about his portraits “These are the only works of which I am not ashamed.”

He would help in rescuing these wretched creatures lives, of abandoned luck and malicious evil.

Artistic compassion was required.

Imagine the sitter seeing his image and knowing how he looked.

 The sharing of this ordeal will have been hard.

It is so difficult today to look at these images, even in reproduction through the internet or on TV.

But look you must, because in these images we see why war is wrong and those heroic stories of heroism in the face of fire fall heavy down to earth when you witness what Henry saw. 

Fire in the face.

No matter how hard I look I turn away from the reality. I try again and still my mind wont let me focus, it is too real, I turn away again and again I try to look.

It seems as if you don't want to, so as not to defy a lifetime of watching war films made, rightly to testify to those brave sods who went over the top. But this is reality.

But, we the world turned its back on the truth and it is only now a hundred years later that we can palate the truth of Henry Tonks images of soldiers brave, those without palates, for a lot of them had been blown to smithereens.

 Those poor people who would not only be reminded, after the war, of that indiscriminate trajectory missile that scarred them.

These faces would remind every one else of the horrors of war and so they would be saddled with carrying the guilt of others lives cut short.

They say when you are staring into the abyss you find yourself, but these poor people look like lost souls, like ghostly images from the deep. I have spared the reader the full horror.

Or are they just the depths of our of our own spirit?

They make you realise that those who were lucky, were sometimes dead. They did not have to live the horrors for the rest of their life. They were free of the stigma of half a decade of mass murder on an industrial scale in those Flanders Fields.

You don't see this sort of stuff in films such as Where Eagles Dare or Force 10 from Navaronne.

We do not see the blood of war like the trench reality would have been.

You cant smell the stench of rotting flesh.

Even though we know Spielberg can do such a brilliant job of convincing us, of showing bullets flying through the air and hollowing the sounds war makes, he would never dare show this. The censors would not let him. But look we must.

When the Americans chased Saddam Hussains Iraqi army out of Kuwait and bombed the hell out of them on the road back to Basra they left many of them as charred skeletons torn of flesh. The images captured by brave war correspondents, of this stench of death, were banned from being shown to the American public.

They might ruin the breakfasts of a nation and spoil their day.

There is no redemption for the victors of war, for they write history. And as with the Vietnamese murder zone a picture can tell a story.

PR can save a President who should be shot or be on trial for war crimes.

For these works by Henry Tonks show the side of war that I want to forget, but I must look at.

I must learn to stare and so I should challenge Presidents and Prime Ministers and Saudi Princes in pure white stainless linen with blood on their hands.

Tony Blair should be made to look at these pictures of the aftermath of war.

Those who survive who will be forever locked into a dream like sequence of recurring nightmare night after night, cast into perpetual recollection for perpetuity, waking up every night screaming need compassion.

So not only is the suffering of war written on the faces of those Tonks Tommy soldier boys they were branded with them for life, or what was left of that life.

How could these boys be taken and destroyed in the flowering of their youth.

And while I am writing this article I see an image by Francis Bacon.

It looks like one of Tonks Tommies with a twisted face, yet this is of his lover.

It seems that he is copying Henry Tonks style?.......but as a way to make himself look clever, to show his prowess as a painter. He has captured Tonks images.

It may be that he has just stumbled across a style.

Bacon grew up during the blitz it is well recorded. He saw bad times.

But did Bacon ever see these images of real despair by Henry Tonks?

Bacon was brave enough to use the twisted and tortured souls of his portraiture and turn it into modernism.

Why can we look at Bacon's work with ease?

No matter how we tell ourselves its haunting we flinch to turn away from images of poor Tommy boys crying inside, bleeding from within.

Is this because Bacon was capturing emotion and not recording the tragedy of grief?

Who could except the compassionate respectful and watchful eye of Henry Tonks?

Who was the better artist?

For to Tonks I tip my hat, to a man who cared, not for himself, because the pastels and watercolours he did was not gallery work, that would hang for all to see on pristine white walls. But show us our guilt of futile pride and slaughter.

  Tonks work has been hidden from public view for almost a hundred years. From a public who would be upset, who would not turn up if they were displayed in a gallery. Maybe they should not be displayed on public view.

They were much more important than that.